Literary Mystery

Cold Storage, Alaska, is a remote fishing outpost where salmonberries sparkle in the morning frost and where you just might catch a King Salmon if you're Zen enough to wait for it. Settled in 1935 by Norse fishermen who liked to skinny dip in its natural hot springs, the town enjoyed prosperity in the mid-20th century, at the height of the frozen fish boom. But now the cold storage plant is all but abandoned and the population is shrinking every day.

Hen and her husband, Lloyd, have settled into a quiet life in a new house outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Hen (short for Henrietta) is an illustrator and works out of a studio nearby and has found the right meds to control her bipolar disorder. Finally, she’s found some stability and peace. But when they meet the neighbors next door, that calm begins to erode as she spots a familiar object displayed on the husband’s office shelf. The sports trophy looks exactly like one that went missing from the home of a young man who was killed two years ago.

In a quest for a simpler life, Helen and Nate have abandoned the comforts of suburbia to take up residence on 44 acres of rural land where they will begin the ultimate, aspirational do-it-yourself project: building the house of their dreams. When they discover that this beautiful property has a dark and violent past, Helen, a former history teacher, becomes consumed by the local legend of Hattie Breckenridge, a woman who lived and died there a century ago.

From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility—when Lilia Albert was a child, her father appeared on the doorstep of her mother's house and took her away. Now, haunted by an inability to remember much about her early childhood, Lilia moves restlessly from city to city, abandoning lovers and eluding the private detective who has dedicated a career to following close behind.

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.

Vampire hunter and zombie animator Anita Blake is an expert at sniffing out the bad from the good. But in The Lunatic Cafe - now in trade paperback for the first time - she's about to learn that nothing is ever as it seems, especially in matters of the not-so-human heart. Dating a werewolf with self-esteem issues is stressing Anita out. Especially when something - or someone - starts taking out the city's shapeshifters.

Bernard White is a curmudgeonly widower who has lived in Seven Springs, Florida for decades and has kept to himself since his wife passed. When his neighbor is murdered, he emerges from his solitude to reconnect with his fellow octogenarians. These connections become a literal lifeline as a second, and then a third, elderly woman is murdered, and "the originals", as they call themselves, realize that they are being targeted.

William Lowell Kane and Abel Rosnovski, one the son of a Boston millionaire, the other a penniless polish immigrant-born on the same day near the turn of the century on opposite sides of the world-are brought together by fate and the quest of a dream. Two men - ambitious, powerful, ruthless - are locked in a relentless struggle to build an empire, fueled by their all-consuming hatred.

Johnny Lundgren, aka Warlock, is an unemployed foundation executive who, after surviving a midlife crisis, finally decides to get a job. Warlock soon gets hired by a crazy but genius doctor as a troubleshooter, where he's tasked with everything from battling poachers in the haunted wilderness of northern Michigan to investigating his employer's wife and son in the seamy underside of Key West. A comedy with one foot in the abyss, Warlock is what the New York Times called "farcical, reflective, luscious, gritty" entertainment from one of this country's most beloved authors.

Three men are found dead in the locked second floor office of a Honolulu building, with no sign of struggle except ultra-fine, razor-sharp cuts covering their bodies. The only clue left behind is a tiny bladed robot, nearly unrecognizable to the human eye.

On a bitterly cold winter's night, Liverpool is left stunned by a brutal murder in the grounds of the city's Anglican Cathedral. A killer is on the loose, driven by a chilling rage. Put on the case, DS Nathan Cody is quickly stumped. Wherever he digs, the victim seems to be almost angelic - no one has a bad word to say, let alone a motive for such a violent murder. And Cody has other things on his mind, too.

In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David Martin, makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city's underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner.

Peter Ash came home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with only one souvenir: what he calls his "white static", the buzzing claustrophobia due to post-traumatic stress that has driven him to spend a year roaming in nature, sleeping under the stars. But when a friend from the marines commits suicide, Ash returns to civilization to help the man's widow with some home repairs. Under her dilapidated porch, he finds more than he bargained for.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman, trapped between her role as her alcoholic father's carer and her day job as a secretary at the prison. When the charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted and unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship.

Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. "Eunice", the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Realizing that her cryptic new employers don’t yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that it’s best they don’t.

Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo, and the ensuing peace brings with it both the desertion of nearly half of Captain Aubrey's crew and the sudden dimming of Aubrey's career prospects in a peacetime navy. When the Surprise is nearly sunk on her way to South America - where Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are to help Chile assert her independence from Spain - the delay occasioned by repairs reaps a harvest of strange consequences.

Bryan LeBlanc worked his way up into a plum position on Wall Street as the boy genius of the foreign exchange desk. Surrounded by "the few, the proud, the completely full of themselves", he decides to give Wall Street a taste of its own medicine and hatches an intricate plan to disappear permanently with just enough misappropriated money - and sailing classes - to spend his golden years cruising the Caribbean. Bryan quickly learns that being a criminal, even a really smart one, is more complicated than he thought. He finds himself on the run in the Cayman Islands, wanted for murder.

Even felines with such amazing talents as Joe Grey and his partner, Dulcie, need some down time. Using their amazing abilities to talk and read, they’ve helped their unwitting humans put bad guys away. But these clever four-footed detectives can’t possibly enjoy a little catnap, not when their lovely seaside village is in an uproar. It’s bad enough that Molena Point has been invaded by a famous writer and his suspiciously rude wife. Then the local yard sales set off a host of puzzling thefts.

An advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend and casually appropriates the image for an advertisement. What he doesn’t realize is that included in the scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences.

The last Boleyn is Jane, Lady Rochford - widow of the disgraced George Boleyn. Caught in the intrigues of the Tudor court, she maneuvers for personal position as her family, in turn, tries to manipulate her. The king has married again; his bride is the deceptively astute Anne of Cleves. Her wits are tested as she senses a trap closing around her, with the Howards ready to take advantage of her fall.